Leo Costelloe’s first artist’s book brings together writing and photography that reflect on intimacy, queer kinship, memory, alienation, and the emotional terrains of domestic life.
Shaped as much by autobiography as by imagination, the texts draw on family narratives, a childhood in Canberra, and the formative experience of coming of age in London, to sketch shifting portraits of home as both a place and a feeling. Costelloe explores understandings of femininity, care and self-actualisation through impressionistic vignettes in which intimate recollections sit alongside performance and fantasy.
Costelloe’s photographs extend the writing’s themes, capturing domestic atmospheres, details and quiet moments of tenderness, sometimes edged with a surreal unease.
An introduction from Tate curator Fiontán Moran situates the publication within Costelloe’s wider practice, linking their fascination with the construction of glamour and the rituals of homemaking to broader questions of gender and class.
Published by Dean’s Bottom, London, 2025
79 pages, section-sewn with naked spine, greyboard cover with hand-taped silver sequin and single strand of synthetic hair
110mm × 170mm
Edition of 500
Foreword by Fiontán Moran
Design: Emmanuel O’Brien
ISBN: 9781068180507
Leo Costelloe
Leo Costelloe (b. 1993, Canberra) is an Irish-Australian interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the transient and sentimental nature of objects in contemporary culture. Drawing from lexicons of digital and historical femininity, adornment and craft, Costelloe’s sculptural practice uses glass, silversmithing, hair, flowers and found objects to recast familiar decorative and utilitarian signifiers and reframe objects’ presupposed meanings.
Costelloe has presented solo exhibitions at NEVEN (2024), Ridley Road Project Space (2022) and Kupfer (2023), and been featured in group exhibitions at CAIM, Slane Castle (2025); NADA New York (2025); Matt Carey-Williams (2024); Studio West Gallery (2024); Indigo + Madder, (2023); The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery (2023); and General Assembly (2023) amongst others. In 2020, they were awarded the Swarovski Scholar Award. Kitchen marks their first published writing and first time time working with scent.